PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
The University of Queensland is what Australians call a “sandstone university,” something like the American Ivy League in prestige. Queensland consistently appears on lists of the world’s 100 best universities and is widely seen as one of the top three in Australia.
Lately, however, its cozy relationship with China has ignited a firestorm. Questions have been asked in Australia’s Parliament, and stories in the country’s leading newspapers and on its public television network have raked administrators over the coals. A Journal news story offers an overview of the scandal.
Queensland’s purgatory began last July during a peaceful student demonstration in support of Hong Kongers protesting for democracy and in solidarity with persecuted Uighurs in Xinjiang. The demonstrators were set upon by what observers said was a well-organized group of about 300 students and nonstudents, many shouting slogans in Chinese. As some filmed the rally, counterdemonstrators snatched megaphones from the pro-Hong Kong and pro-Uighur protesters and sought to break up the rally. Punches were thrown.
Xu Jie, China’s consul general in Brisbane, commended the counter-demonstrators for their “acts of patriotism,” while blaming the pro-Hong Kong students for “igniting anger and sparking protests from Chinese students.” In a highly unusual step, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne warned all foreign diplomats in Australia to respect the rights of free speech and peaceful protest. Amid all this, the press reported that Mr. Xu had recently been appointed an adjunct professor at the university.
During times of war and chaos, someone profits. As the world continues to reel from the coronavirus pandemic, businesses have shuttered, families have lost loved ones, and governments at the federal, state, and local levels have scrambled to provide adequate resources to the public. Meanwhile, after lying to international health organizations and governments around the world, China seeks to repair its public image and capitalize on a pandemic it allowed to wreak havoc on the world.
Beijing is positioned to recover faster than its competitors, including the United States. Why that is contains a lesson for America going forward, if we don’t want to be back in this position again.
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a plan to expand China’s global footprint in infrastructure projects abroad called the “Belt and Road Initiative.” What followed was a series of projects aimed at connecting over 65 countries with access to financing in excess of $1 trillion. The relationships span the globe, even including ambitions to control the Arctic Circle. The initiative has given China significant access to resources, economic zones, and trade routes. According to the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, from “2000 to 2017, the Chinese government, banks and contractors signed $146 billion in loan commitments to African governments and their state-owned enterprises.” Foreign Policy reports, “Djibouti, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Montenegro … owe more than 45% of their gross domestic products to Beijing over Belt and Road projects.”
And thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s lack of political or economic competition at home, it has been able to lend money on terms advantageous to Beijing — and only Beijing. Azeem Ibrahim, a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, notes, “Beijing is becoming adept at translating outstanding debts into foreign assets.” The Belt and Road program largely relies on low-interest credit facilities collateralized by borrowing countries’ infrastructure or natural resources. Due to the poor credit of the sovereign borrower or low expectation of performance of the asset in question, many call China’s practice a form of “neo-colonialism” or “creditor imperialism” through what’s called “debt-trap diplomacy.” The Institute for Security Studies has gone so far as to call China’s behavior a “predatory system designed to ensnare countries into a straightjacket of debt servitude.”
How this works in practice: Borrowers that are unable to fulfill their loan obligations cede tremendous bargaining leverage to the Chinese when they seek to restructure the debt. If they default, the Chinese government simply seizes control of the asset. For example, the Sri Lankan government entered into a credit deal with the Chinese for a port (which reports indicate was a shaky bet, financially, from the start). When the asset didn’t perform to the terms of the contract, Sri Lanka granted China a 99-year lease on the port, including over 150,000 acres of land surrounding it. Just like that, the Chinese Communist Party gained control over a major waterway of another country.
I verified that there was a H3N2 pandemic in 1968 – 1969 and the CDC states that 100,000 Americans died. www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html
Nancy
Woodstock Happened During a Pandemic & Nobody Cared
By May 5, 2020
Remember Woodstock?
It was the summer of love: in 1969 a half a million people gathered together to listen to music, take drugs, have sex, roll around in the mud, and share a densely populated area for one long weekend.
And guess what? The whole thing happened during a health pandemic.
In 1968 the H3N2 pandemic came to the US from Hong Kong. It killed more than 100,000 Americans, mostly over the age of 65, which was more combined fatalities than both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.
Schools, movie theaters, bars, tattoo parlors, restaurants, and, of course, concerts venues stayed open. The stock market didn’t crash, Congress didn’t issue a lock down order, the Federal reserve had no involvement, there was no spike in the suicide rate, violent criminals weren’t freed from jail, and nobody arrested surfers or hair stylists.
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.
Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.
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Note from publisher; I read the following on Facebook post and was granted permission from Mr. Niccolazzo to republish it as long as I changed nothing. We can’t get information like this in the USA. Although this is outside the purview of this publication, we do all live in the world ~ Daryl L. Hunter www.greater-yellowstone.com/2020-articles/Message-from-Italy.html Other source: hotcopper.com.au/threads/italy-corona-and-china.5322646/
As posted to Facebook on March 15 at 9:36 PM ITALY’S COMMUNIST RECIPE FOR DISASTER Published March 24, 2020 | By Giacomino Nicolazzo Giacomino Nicolazzo is one of Italy’s most beloved writers. Born and raised in Central Pennsylvania, he lives in a small village in Lombardy where he writes his books. Montecalvo, Lombardy, Italy. As I sit here in my involuntary isolation, it was just reported that overnight 743 more people died and 5.249 new cases have been reported. This brings the total cases of infection to 69,176 and the body count to 6,820. We take relief in knowing that 8,326 people have recovered so far. (Numbers as of 3/24, 8:30pm in Italy.) Most towns here in Italy, from the upper reaches of the Alps to the ancient shores of Sicilia and Sardenia, while not deserted, are closer to being ghost towns than the bustling centers of tourism, business and daily life they were just a few weeks ago. |
Stores and shops have been shuttered. Restaurants and coffee shops no longer serve customers. Schools, universities, sporting arenas…even our museums and theaters…all closed. Even the Vatican City has closed its gates and armed patrols monitor the 20 foot tall walls that protect it!
Streets and roads are now empty for as far as the eye can see. Normally they would be filled with crazed Italian drivers in tiny cars and scooters (the ones that sound like demonic insects) darting here and there, reaching the limits of centrifugal force on our roundabouts. In the piazze of our towns and cities, there are now officially more pigeons than people.
Many of us know someone who has been infected and recovered. Some of us know someone who did not recover…now they are dead. But everyone knows someone who has been affected by this microscopic monster in one way or another.
Sixty million of us are in lockdown…it is like a war zone here. We are being held prisoner in our own homes by an unseen enemy that sneaked in unnoticed…by most of us. As you will read in just a few more minutes, there were those who knew something like this was coming…or at least they should have.
So who is to blame? With all this craziness swirling like a whirlpool at our feet, I just had to find the blame answer. And so I have spent my free time (of which I have a lot in these days) digging and researching. I was literally shocked to discover how this has come to be.
I am not going to bore you with talk of Patient ‘0’ who spread it to Patient ‘1’ and how mathematics efficiently explains the rapid expansion of infection. No…I am going to tell you how (as I see it) the virus came to Italy.
It has everything to do with communists. Allow me to explain.
When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.
Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.
The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling communist government.
Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.
China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.
Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran’s terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration’s estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.
Last week, Trump nonchalantly offered the Palestinians a take-it-or-leave-it independent state on the West Bank, but without believing that a West Bank settlement was the key to peace in the entire Middle East.
Trump’s cancellation of the Iran deal, in particular, was met with international outrage. More global anger followed after the targeted killing of Iranian terrorist leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
In short, Trump’s Middle East recalibrations won few supporters among the bipartisan establishment.
But recently, Europeans have privately started to agree that more sanctions are needed on Iran, that the world is better off with Soleimani gone, and that the West Bank is not central to regional peace.
www.foxnews.com/politics/pompeo-warns-governors-of-china-infiltration
FOX NEWS
POMPEO WARNS OF CHINESE INFILTRATION INTO U.S.
February 8, 2020
China‘s Communist Party has infiltrated various levels of America’s infrastructure and is working to destroy the values of the United States, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a speech Saturday, while also warning state governors to be wary of China’s infiltration.
“We can’t ignore China’s actions and strategic intentions,” he said while addressing the National Governors Association winter meeting. “The Chinese government has been methodical in the way it’s analyzed our system… it’s assessed our vulnerabilities and it’s decided to exploit our freedoms, to gain an advantage over us at the federal level, the state level and the local level.”
“Competition with China is happening. It’s happening in your state,” Pompeo added. “In fact, I’d be surprised if most of you in the audience had not been lobbied by the Chinese Communist Party directly.”
He said groups loyal to communist China are operating out in the open in Virginia, Minnesota, Florida and dozens of other states all around the country. Other Chinese groups, however, practice their nefarious actions in the shadows in an attempt to exercise influence over U.S. citizens and lawmakers.
Aceh’s all-female Sharia flogging squad is the perfect metaphor for Western feminists’ refusal to denounce Sharia oppression of women. When the time comes, maybe the Women’s March or Code Pink could select female floggers for Sharia police in the U.S.
“Indonesia’s Sharia police tout historic female flogging squad: ‘Her technique was nice,’” by Douglas Ernst, Washington Times, January 28, 2020:
Indonesia’s Sharia police have a unique take on diversity that might seem odd to Western ears: its historic all-female flogging squad.
Banda Aceh Sharia police chief investigator Zakwan, who uses one name, told Agence France-Presse this week that he was thrilled with a new recruit’s lashing performance.
“I think she did a good job. Her technique was nice,” he said for an interview published Tuesday.
The piece by Haeril Halim detailed justice being meted out against an unmarried woman who was found in a hotel room with a man.
“The masked woman nervously approaches her target, shuffles into position and then unleashes a flurry of lashes — proving herself as the newest member of the first female flogging squad in Indonesia’s Aceh province,” the piece reads. “But despite her reticence, she persevered and delivered her first flogging.”
AFP noted that the city of roughly 220,000 has three shifts of Sharia police patrolling throughout the day.
Other crimes that may result in beatings with a a rattan cane include the following: adultery, drinking alcohol, having gay sex, and gambling.
“We train them to make sure they’re physically fit and teach them how to do a proper whipping,” Zakwan told AFP. “It’s kind of an indoctrination that we give to them so they have a better understanding of their role — have no mercy for those who violate God’s law.”…